Feeding Mule - Rear, from Die Zweite Thierfolge

One of Reinhart’s rare departures from a lifelong focus on landscapes, this realistic pair of etchings (2013.439–440) depicts two views of a single mule standing in the Italian countryside. The mule’s dual positioning possibly alludes to Renaissance-era studies of the female nude. Thus the mule becomes not just a prop in a landscape, but the artwork’s protagonist, a carefully studied figure atop a familiarly bucolic ground.